Month: March 2015

Ever since I bought my F&V K480 video light I had wanted to pick a dark location, light up just the model and create a photo with the model correctly lit but the rest close to pitch dark.

In the photo above, the light source is to the left in front of the model; I metered off her chin with my external lightmeter and used my camera in manual mode with an exposure of 0.5 seconds at f/2.8. The TTL tried to inform me that the exposure was way, way underexposed but as always, the incident lightmeter knows best. The video light is easier to use for me than an off-camera flash unit: The light I am using is available for metering and any shadows are visible while the shot is being set up, so it easy to make it work, etc..

During my visit to Scottsdale, Arizona, we walked the short, 3.7 mile, Marcus Landslide trail at the McDowell Mountain Regional Park in the Sonoran desert north of Scottsdale. Some 500,000 years ago one of the instable mountains crumbled and 5.5 million cubic meters of granite rock, vegetation and soil flowed eastward for 1.5-kilometres.

What’s left is a very scenic area with beautiful and changing vistas around every corner of the hike with the mountains on one side and the valley on the other.

The surprising thing is that this enormous landslide was only “discovered” in 2002. I think the word really is “recognized” as the location had been known for ages, of course, it was just that nobody had recognized it as the remains of a catastrophic landslide.

Shot on Kodak TRI-X at EI 400 using an orange filter, developed in HC-110 dilution H for 11 minutes, agitation: 2 inversions every 30 seconds.